William F. Buckley Dies

[Darth Wong]

The funny thing about William F Buckley is that he's a hero of people who hate liberal-arts types, but he embodies their worst characteristics: specifically, the tendency to cloak preposterous arguments in an ornate whirlwind of flowery language in order to disguise what they are.

This is a guy who would take a simple knuckle-dragger idea like "blacks are too stupid to be given the vote" and wrap it up in so much verbosity and style that by the time he's done, you feel like you've been lectured by a brilliant university professor but you're not entirely sure how he justified anything he said, or whether he even tried.

[Elfdart]

His career is just more proof that Americans will swallow any kind of bullshit so long as it's recited in an upper class accent. By now David Duke must be catching on that his money spent on bogus college degrees and heavy duty facelifts was wasted and he should have hired a voice coach to put on a posh accent instead.

[Darth Wong]

"William F Buckley was brilliant!"

"How do you know that?"

"Because he sounds brilliant!"

I love the way one of his most famous debates was him defending the Vietnam War, which virtually everyone agrees now was a huge boondoggle and which was held up as an example of what America would not do in Iraq. Mind you, I notice now that as Iraq becomes more and more like Vietnam, American conservatives have started dusting off a lot of old Vietnam apologist arguments again.

[TithonusSyndrome]

Ironically, for all of his grandiloquent showboating and would-be intellectual obscurantism, I remember Buckley as the fucknugget who said that he'd rather be governed by the first 100 names in the Boston phonebook than Havard's brightest or some other "man of the people" horseshit.

[Elfdart]

Here's more of Buckley at the 1968 convention. Link

What's really funny is that he sneers at the idea of the US making overtures toward China and playing the Chinese off against Russia, when in just four years that's exactly what his candidate, Richard Nixon did. On top of that, right-wingers like Buckley started claiming credit for it! All that "only Nixon can go to China" bullshit from the same people who insisted all along that China, Russia and Vietnam were all in league with one another to take over America.

He was the original Texas Sharpshooter.

[Morilore]

God, why are all the newspapers still publishing hero-worship editorials of this guy? I've read like five by now, and I'd hate the guy for that even if I knew nothing else about him.